Voice & Agency
3 indicatorsInput in livelihood decisions
Real input into decisions on livelihood activities.
Autonomy in income use
Decides independently how her income is used.
Self-efficacy
Confidence in her ability to achieve goals.
How it works
Built to fit India, not just translated
A digitized empowerment assessment for women in FPOs, SHGs and producer collectives. It scores Voice & Agency, Assets & Finance, Time & Mobility, and Collective Strength — indicator by indicator, so programs see exactly where a woman is empowered and where the gaps are.
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Start assessment
Respondent, project & language selected
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Administer survey
Revised modules, field-ready
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Auto-scored
Checked against India cutoffs
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Indicator profile
9 indicators, 4 domains
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Dashboard report
Real-time, shareable
Every objective behind it was set before a single question was written:
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Build an India-specific, future-ready application
Multilingual support
Available in 22 Indian Gazetted Languages.
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Cut the time it takes to deploy at scale
Real-time by design
Data entry, processing and dashboard visualization are digitized end-to-end.
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Make it adaptable enough to plug into the platforms programs already use
Built for integration
Designed to be digitally adaptable, with potential integration into existing program platforms and data systems.
What happens the instant she answers
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Response captured
Entered digitally, in her own language
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Checked against cutoff
Matched to its India-calibrated adequacy threshold
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Score updates
Her domain and overall score recalculate automatically
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Dashboard updates
Live — no batch processing, no waiting
Methodology
How the tool actually scores a respondent
Built on IFPRI’s pro-WEAI+MI (2020) and original pro-WEAI (Malapit et al., 2019), then recalibrated at three levels: modules, questions, and cutoffs.
Final scores
Assets & Finance
3 indicatorsOwnership of land & assets
Sole/joint ownership of land or 3+ asset types.
Access to financial services
Self-directed borrowing and spending decisions.
Control over use of income
Input into income use across agri & non-agri work.
Time & Mobility
2 indicatorsWork balance
Works below a time-poverty threshold.
Visiting important locations
Self-decided visits to markets, family or FPO/SHG meetings.
Collective Strength
1 indicatorGroup membership
Active FPO member — attends and participates, not membership on paper.
Plus: 4 non-scored identification & profile modules — general and individual ID, socio-economic profile, and FPO/group membership — capture context alongside the 9 scored indicators.
Scoring mechanism
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Each indicator is scored “adequate” or “not adequate” against its own India-calibrated cutoff.
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Her adequate indicators are then counted up into a domain score, and the domain scores into one overall score — the same simple counting method used across WEAI assessments worldwide.
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The output is a profile, not just a number — showing exactly which indicators are adequate and where the gaps sit, using the domain breakdown above.
Each indicator has its own clear definition and India-specific cutoff, laid out in detail in NAARI’s methodology guide.
Easy-to-read classification
Two classifications. Immediately actionable.
Empowered
Adequate across enough weighted indicators to be classified as empowered.
Disempowered
Falls short on enough indicators to signal a meaningful empowerment gap — and shows programs exactly where.
A woman is classified as empowered when she’s adequate across most of the weighted indicators — not just one or two strong areas.
What the score actually means
Every woman needs a different intervention
A single empowerment score can hide as much as it reveals. Two women can land on the same number for entirely different reasons — one needs access to credit, another needs time back in her day. NAARI’s indicator-level profile is built to tell them apart.
Illustrative profiles below are composites built from patterns across the pilot data — not individual respondents.
Strong domainGap
Sunita
Sunita speaks up in every FPO meeting and decides how her own income is used. But she owns no land, and can’t borrow without her husband’s sign-off.
Meena
Meena co-owns her land and leads her SHG. But between fieldwork and the household, she has no time of her own and rarely travels unsupervised.
Radha
Radha manages her own money and moves freely. But she doubts her ability to influence decisions, and rarely speaks up in meetings.
See your own snapshot
5 questions. 90 seconds.
Where do you stand?
A fast, indicative read on Voice & Agency, Assets & Finance, Time & Mobility, and Collective Strength — pulled from the full NAARI assessment.
How much say do you have in decisions about your farm or work?
Whether your input actually shapes what happens, not just whether you’re asked
Responses are saved for administrator review.
What the first round of data actually shows
Share of respondents scored “adequate” on each indicator, Round 1 (n = 1,567). Empowerment is strongest in decision-making and confidence — and weakest in access to finance and asset ownership.
- Women-only Producer Enterprises score higher than mixed-gender FPOs on most indicators.
- SHG members show higher empowerment than non-SHG members on almost every indicator.
- Land ownership is linked with higher scores across most other indicators too.
- Social category matters — group membership is highest among General-category respondents and lowest among ST respondents, with work-balance showing the reverse pattern.
Built with women, tested on the ground
Designed using real-world experiences
Built with a goal to help every organization in the women’s empowerment and agriculture ecosystem measure empowerment systematically and not just count participation.
- 2,112women assessed1,567 in Round 1 · 545 in Round 2
- 1,060SHG members surveyedin Round 1 alone
- 2assessment rounds completedto date
- 8states covered5 states in each round, 2 overlapping
Fielded across
- Maharashtra
- Uttar Pradesh
- Madhya Pradesh
- Jharkhand
- Rajasthan
- Telangana
- Bihar
- Uttarakhand
Supported by the Gates Foundation.
Shaped with guidance from
The people who made NAARI rigorous
The revised tool was shaped through direct conversations with researchers and practitioners.
Chiara Kovarik
Gates Foundation
Archana
Pradan
Prof. Vidya Vemireddy
IIM-Ahmedabad
See what empowerment actually looks like in your programme.
Free for FPOs, SHGs, funders and implementation partners to assess.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is NAARI TOOL?
NAARI TOOL stands for Project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index plus Market Inclusion Index. It helps programs measure women’s agency, decision-making power and inclusion in agricultural value chains, especially around market participation.
2. Who can use the NAARI TOOL?
The tool can be used by development programs, FPOs, NGOs, research teams, funders and market-system partners that want to understand whether women are able to make decisions, access resources, participate in markets and benefit from agriculture-linked work.
3. How is the NAARI TOOL different from the previous NAARI tool?
Traditional NAARI focuses on empowerment in agriculture. Pro-NAARI is designed for project-level use, while NAARI TOOL adds a market inclusion lens so teams can study barriers and opportunities across value chains, not only within production or household roles.
4. Who developed the NAARI TOOL?
NAARI TOOL builds on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index work led by IFPRI and partners. This platform presents a practical implementation for agriculture and market-inclusion programs, with a focus on field usability and actionable insights.
5. What does the tool measure?
It measures dimensions such as decision-making, access to resources, control over income, leadership, time use, mobility, market access, bargaining power, confidence and the conditions that enable or restrict women’s participation in value chains.
6. How does the tool support program decisions?
The results help teams identify where women face the strongest constraints and which interventions may be needed, such as training, access to finance, market linkages, household engagement, leadership support or changes in service delivery.
7. What types of women can be assessed?
The tool can be used with women farmers, FPO members, workers, entrepreneurs, aggregators, processors, traders and other women who participate in agriculture or allied value chains. The sample should match the project’s target group.
8. Is the tool only for women?
Women are the primary focus, but the survey can include men or household-level respondents when comparison is useful. This helps teams understand gender gaps, household dynamics and differences in access to resources or decision-making.
9. How long does it take to administer?
Timing depends on the modules selected, translation needs, respondent profile and enumerator training. A shorter digital module can be used for rapid assessment, while a full research-grade implementation requires more time for sampling, interviews and quality checks.
10. Do we need to adapt the tool for different countries?
Yes. The core concepts should remain consistent, but questions, examples, language and market-context details should be adapted to local crops, value chains, social norms and respondent literacy levels before field deployment.
11. How are empowerment scores calculated?
Survey responses are coded against defined indicators and then aggregated to show empowerment status, areas of disempowerment and patterns across groups. The score is useful because it points to specific constraints, not just an overall number.
12. What is the output of using the tool?
Outputs can include respondent-level data, indicator summaries, empowerment profiles, market-inclusion insights and program recommendations. These outputs help teams design, monitor and improve gender-responsive agricultural interventions.
13. What resources are needed to implement NAARI TOOL?
A good implementation needs a clear study design, trained enumerators, translated tools, ethical consent processes, quality checks, data analysis capacity and time for interpretation with program teams and local stakeholders.
14. Where can I access the tool and guidelines?
Users should follow the platform guidance and refer to official NAARI resources when designing research-grade studies. For program use, teams should select the modules that fit their value chain, geography and learning objective.
15. Can results influence project design?
Yes. The tool is most valuable when results are used to adjust program design, target support, strengthen market access, improve services for women and track whether interventions are increasing agency and inclusion over time.